Category: Discussion

I have a pair of wireless Bose QC35s which are awesome, they are the headphones I primarily use because the noise cancelling is insane, and for my non-audiophile ears they sound amazing.

But they are big, and not really appropriate for use if I don’t have a bag to put them in. That’s why, until now, I’ve always kept a pair of wired in-ear headphones that I can take out with me when I don’t want to carry around a bag and carry case.

As an example, if I’m going on a night out I want to carry as little as possible on me, but I really need some way of listening to music on the train home (because nobody needs to deal with the last train home without music). In these sorts of situations, audio quality is definitely not at the top of my list, but portability and discreteness are; two things AirPods excel at.

That’s not to say the audio quality on AirPods is bad, although they leak sound just like regular EarPods, they sound great to me and I’ve had absolutely no issue with connection at all.

On top of being insanely portable, sounding great and being easy to set up, when used alongside an Apple Watch it’s a match made in heaven. The lack of track and volume controls totally disappears when you have access to both the Music app and the Now Playing “Glance” (you can add this to the Dock in watchOS 3). Better still, the Now Playing Glance lets you control Spotify, or indeed anything else that shows up in the audio controls section of Control Center on iOS.

AirPods are, currently, an extravagance. As someone who loves gadgets I can find ways to justify the cost to myself, but not everyone can. But they are new, and Apple knows they can make some extra bucks from early adopters (as they have done many times in the past, with the first MacBook Air, Retina MacBook Pro and 12″ MacBook as examples). Wireless is the future, and I long for the day wires are completely abolished from everything, not just computing. The cost of them will come down as competition becomes more fierce and the technology matures, but until then I can firmly say, these are the most expensive backup headphones I’ve ever bought, but they are truly, utterly worth it.

Let me start by saying I do not hate Apple Watch. I love Apple Watch, I have two different models and have owned more than that, and the device hasn’t been out even a year yet. It’s an awesome little device and has so much potential.

But, I personally feel Apple made a significant error releasing Apple Watch with watchOS 1 which will do some very long-term damage to Apple Watch’s reputation for iterations to come. Here’s why:

1. People think Apple Watch is slow

watchOS 1 apps had a very different architecture to watchOS 2 apps. watchOS 1 apps were, in essence, extensions of an iOS app which ran on the iPhone itself, and essentially just used the watch as a second screen.

To load anything, or respond to taps, Apple Watch had to ask the iPhone for the information or to carry out the task and then refresh the UI and send any data back. Over Bluetooth. This took a lot of time, especially when first loading the app’s UI, and everything felt sluggish.

Mere months later, Apple release watchOS 2 to developers with native apps. Native apps no longer get loaded from the iPhone each time and all components of the app are stored on the watch. Apple Watch apps can now do most computation on-device, and don’t need to load the UI from the iPhone. Everything is super speedy, well-written apps load in 3-5 seconds, and UI is very responsive, but it requires (parts of) the app to be re-written. This brings me to point 2:

2. Many developers don’t want to spend time porting a watchOS 1 app to watchOS 2

Whether you’re a big company or an independent developer, finding out there’s a whole new architecture (and new APIs to port to as a result1) to develop for just a few months after the device has released isn’t great news. It takes time to develop an app, especially on a brand new platform, even on a device as small as Apple Watch.

I’ve lost the article now (I think it was on WatchAware.com) but there was a report about how few apps have been updated to be native, and for me this is still true for many watchOS apps that I use like Philips Hue. It’s frustrating to know that their app could load significantly faster if they ported to watchOS 2, and if a company that far advanced in terms of iOS and HomeKit support haven’t ported to watchOS 2, is it so surprising that more independent developers haven’t either?

We can’t expect all users of Apple Watch to understand that even though they’ve updated to watchOS 2, an app isn’t automatically native. To them, it’s just another slow to load app. This hurts the developers’ reputation and also Apple Watch’s reputation.

So many developers wanted to make the gold rush when Apple Watch was released, there were so many apps being released at the time that it was staggering. Imagine if every single one of those apps were native and had access to the same APIs that apps could a mere few months later.

In my opinion, Apple should have waited. It would have launched with reviews of how responsive the UI is in apps, rather than the opposite.

***

1 Updating my app, MacID for Apple Watch, to support watchOS 2 was surprisingly more difficult than I expected. If I had multiple apps to port to watchOS 2 I honestly couldn’t say if I would have spent the time porting all of them, but that just further highlights my point.

Yesterday was National Coming Out Day, a day I love because we all get to share our stories, remember our experiences and, hopefully, show other gay people that it’s okay and everything will be alright.

While pottering about thinking about my own experience, it dawned on me; although I “officially” came out when I was 13 (if there is such a thing), I’ve never stopped coming out since.

Coming out is made to sound like a one-time, rip-the-plaster-off experience. Often painful, but better to do quickly, right? In reality, that is hardly the case. Sure, I may now find it easier to tell new people I’m gay, but each time I do, I’m still coming out to them all over again.
If I start a new job or get a new barber, I will inevitably have to let them know at some point, or be subjected to talk about “fit birds” or asked if I saw “that one”. Telling a new barber is especially scary as not only are they in control of how I look for the next few weeks, they also have a razor to hand. Yes, it is still a fear even in 2015.

When talking to someone new and they ask me whether I have a girlfriend and I say no, it’s assumed I’m single. The onus is on me to clarify and risk being shunned out of a potential new circle of friends.

I’m not trying to say that coming out isn’t easier in 2015; quite the contrary. We have such easy access to a fantastic community and array of support I would say it’s easier than ever (if you live in certain countries), but these things are all still very real and can get incredibly tedious. I’m 28 now, I can’t even imagine how many times I’ve been told I don’t “look gay”. Well, comrade, I can assure you I am, it’s been the one constant in my life and something that has made me a very independent person.

To clarify, I don’t really give a fuck if some closed-minded person dislikes me because I happen to find men more attractive than women, I know there are more people in the world who I would prefer dedicating my friendship to. But that doesn’t change the possibility of violence, or the possibility that it could negatively affect my career.

We take a lot of shit as gay people, and far too many people are still uncomfortable talking naturally about themselves in conversation. This needs to change. If you’re ever on the other side of the conversation and realising that someone is gay, brush it off and carry on. Let them know you’re okay with gay people by continuing to be the same person, so they can too. Don’t say ridiculous things like “I don’t have a problem with gay people.”, or “I have a gay friend, do you know them?”. It’s insulting, even if you didn’t realise it before now.

You don’t have to come out as someone who accepts me, just accept me. Besides, I’m awesome and it’s your loss if you don’t.

After getting my grubby fingers all over an Apple Watch since the 24th April I’ve had a fair bit of time to use it, both for personal use and for development of MacID.

During that time I’ve been asked time and time again:

What does it do? Is it worth it?

The answers I give to that are “everything” and “yes”, but I think what people really want to know when they ask is, “what is it good for?”.

To answer that, lets have a look at where Apple’s other products fit in to our lives. (This, of course, is circumstantial and just a generalisation).

The Mac, nowadays, is ultimately for creating content. OS X is still the parent of all other Apple products, and it’s still usually the easiest way of doing multiple things at once when you’re working on a project. The iPad tries to be a content creator, but in reality it still fails in many aspects. Sure, it’s good for a quick edit of a Pages document, but if you want to create a website, code an app, do some detailed design work, or write an essay, you still need to use a proper operating system with much more accurate input.

iOS on the other hand, is amazing for consuming content and communication. Twitter, Instagram, messaging, iBooks, listening to Music; these are all far superior on iOS. Again, you can do all of this on your Mac now, but engagement is much higher on mobile devices for this sort of content.

So, what about Apple Watch? I personally think Apple Watch will excel with utility apps. Apps which allow you to unlock your Mac or hotel room, board a plane, check your car’s current charge, book a cab, control your TV, or check off a shopping list. These all take seconds of your time for each interaction, and are perfect for the small form factor.

Once developers stop seeing Apple Watch as something they have to get their current apps onto, and start understanding where it will excel, Apple Watch (and other wearables) will start to become integral in our lives just like laptops and smartphones.

I thought I would run through some of the new iOS 8 features to help people make the most of iOS 8 right from the start. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but since I’ve been playing with iOS 8 since the beta and it’s now released I’m no longer governed by my developer licence’s NDA with Apple and can share them with you publicly.

I really don’t care how many of these are already on other operating systems, or jailbroken iOS devices. I’ve purposely not pointed out where some of these features have been implemented better than specific competitors, I’m just pointing out that they now exist and are really cool.

Notifications

The entirely unnecessary “missed” section in the Notification Centre has now been removed. RIP.

Widgets can be added to the Today view and reordered by tapping the button at the bottom. Widgets have to be bundled with a functional app from the App Store so expect them to be from the likes of eBay, weather apps and Google Now etc to start off with.

Notifications can be actioned (where implemented, like the Messages app) by either pulling down on the notification, or swiping left and tapping and action on a notification on the lock screen.

Weather

iOS has (thankfully) ditched Yahoo! Weather as the API for the built-in weather. Now the Weather Channel’s API is used which shows more data like a 9 day forecast, and an icon has been added to the weather widget in the Today section of the Notification Centre. In my experience it is more accurate in England, however BBC weather is still the best. That said, now that apps can make Today view widgets, there’s nothing stopping BBC making one themselves now.

Keyboard

The default iOS keyboard now has a text prediction bar along the top, which can be hidden by swiping down on it or holding down the keyboard change key.

iOS now allows 3rd party keyboards to be installed which can be bundled by developers as part of an app distributed to the App Store. Security has been taken into mind and there are two types of keyboards, ones that ask for access to the Internet and your location and ones that don’t. It’s your choice whether you trust a keyboard that asks for Internet connectivity with your keystrokes. That said, Apple don’t allow any keyboards to enter into secure fields like password fields; although slightly jarring to be forced back into the default keyboard it does mean your passwords can never be captured by malicious keyboard developers.

App Switcher

Not a huge change but the App Switcher now shows recent contacts, and if you swipe right shows your favourites. Tap on one to call, text or FaceTime them.

Health

iOS 8 comes with a built in Health app that developers can link their apps to. This is designed to give you a central point to view comprehensive health data. Health also uses the motion coprocessor in the 5s and newer to display information like steps walked throughout the day (which is always being detected by iOS) and will take advantage of Watch’s health features too. With the iPhone 6, this is supposed to give you elevation information too, such as flights of steps climbed.

HealthKit – the set of APIs Apple has created for developers to integrate their apps into Health – not only allows iOS to aggregate health data from multiple apps but also to share that data with other apps. So your sleep monitoring app could let your distance tracker know when you woke up.

Possibly the most important thing (for me) to be added to iOS 8 is the ability to add a Medical ID card to the emergency call section of the lock screen. This means you can add emergency contacts, your allergies, important health information such as blood type, and whether you’re an organ donor. This sort of information was usually hidden if you lock your phone with a passcode (which pretty much anyone with Touch ID now does), and if you’re in an accident this could save your life and get emergency services in contact with your family much quicker.

Tips

There is now a built in Tips app which new iOS users can check each week for tips on how to make the most of their new iDevice.

Siri

Most notably, you can now activate Siri by saying “Hey Siri” and immediately asking what you want it to do. “Hey Siri” works either when your phone is connected to power or when Siri’s screen is already open. (In my experience you have to flip the switch in Siri’s settings before you can use this feature.) You get near-live feedback of what Siri’s hearing you say now, too.

Siri can also now utilise Shazam for song recognition, although I’ve only managed to actually get this to work a handful of times.

Messages

Messages sees some of the biggest changes in iOS 8, some of which you can’t really miss. You can now send Snapchat-esque audio clips, video clips and photos straight from the message thread. Hold down either the camera or microphone button and slide your finger upwards to send straight away. Clips can be set to expire and you get notified if the recipient has chosen to keep it, which coupled with the new ability to automatically delete old messages means you won’t get Messages taking up precious gigabytes on your iDevices.

You can choose to “Raise to Listen” to audio clips, and can also reply in the same manner, which effectively means you can have a phone call with someone without having to be on the phone at the same time, and might save some embarrassment of having to listen to audio in public. Like other notifications you can also reply to audio messages from the lock screen without having to unlock your phone.

On each message thread there’s a new Details button at the top. This brings up your friends’ location (if you have them added to Find my Friends), allows you to send them your location, mute the thread, and see every single picture you’ve sent them right to when the thread first started. These features all work with both single-person messages and group messages.

If you want to send a regular image from your Photo Library you just tap on the camera button in the message and now it’ll give you a scrollable list of recent images, let you bring up your whole Library or let you take a new photo or video. Anyone who’s used Tweetbot will know this is similar to (and better than) the super useful “use last image” function when sending a tweet.

If you’re lazy you can mark all messages as read too, from the thread list view just tap Edit and then Read All.

You can now name group messages, and can easily add or remove people from it, also in the Details section.

Spotlight

Safari

A feature that Chrome for iOS has had for some time is the ability to request the desktop version of a website, which you can now do natively in Safari by tapping on the address bar, and then pulling down on your favourites. You’ll get two options; Add to Favourites and Request Desktop Site. The way this feature works on both Chrome and Safari is by changing the user agent of the browser. For anyone that isn’t savvy to web development, this basically means its an identifier that your browser sends the server to say what version it is, and can easily be modified. Some websites check this first to decide what sort of website to show you, but if it’s a purely responsive website (one that just reshuffled the design based on screen size) then you will have to just hope they’ve implemented a way of viewing the full website in their own website.

Safari can also now show you a more in-depth “Top Hit” as you’re searching and also link to apps in the App Store related to your search.

When you first open a tab or tap the address bar, underneath your favourites you’ll also now get a view of frequently visited sites.

Private sessions in Safari have gotten a little more sensible in iOS 8. Previously, if you tapped Private it would ask you if you wanted to close all open tabs or make them private too. Similarly when turning it off. Now it just opens the Private view of Safari, and shows you all your private tabs currently open. Tapping the Private button again takes you back to your regular tabs, and hides your Private ones.

There’s now a “Quick Website Search” feature added to Safari, which enables you to search within certain sites using the address bar. For example, you can type “Amazon Kitchenaid” and Safari will give you the option of searching Amazon for Kitchenaid products instead of just Google. This seems to only work once you’ve already made an initial search on a site sometime in the past, which adds it to the Quick Website Search list in Safari’s settings.

According to the release notes, Safari now automatically blocks App Store auto-redirects from within websites.

Safari can now take a picture of your credit card and autofill payment information on websites too.

Also, on iPad you can now see all tabs that are open, like on iPhone.

Photos

Akin to Photo Stream introduced in iOS 5 which is limited to the last 1000 images, you can now choose to store your entire photo library in iCloud, which will sync to every other iCloud device. You also have the option of optimising your iDevice’s storage by downloading optimised (read: lower resolution) versions of photos, or you can choose to download and keep originals. At this time, Photo Steam is also still able to be used alongside it, but I wouldn’t expect that to stay forever.

You can choose to upload Burst photos too, or just to upload the one that iOS chooses to be the best out of each Burst.

Photos in your library can now be favourited, which provides a slightly easier way to save your gifs for quick access. Deleted messages now go into a “Recently Deleted” album which get automatically deleted after a set amount of days. Each photo states how many days it has left before it’s deleted permanently automatically or you can choose to delete permanently manually from here. Although more cumbersome, it does mean you are less likely to lose photos by accident.

Editing photos in iOS has always been great, especially as it’s non-destructive (meaning you can go back and change it back to the original at any time), but it’s been enhanced in iOS 8. If you tap on the crop button, iOS will now automatically attempt to straighten your image. If you don’t like it, just spin the dial until it snaps back to 0, or tap the reset button. Straightening photos with this dial is much easier than using two fingers to spin the image as before.

Unfortunately there haven’t been any extra filters added in iOS 8, but you have far greater control over Light, Colour or B&W. Initially when you tap on one of these you’ll get a simple slider with a live preview of the effect, however if you tap the expand button you’ll get even more control. For example, expanding the Light setting means you can edit exposure, highlights, shadows etc all individually.

Anyone who edits images regularly in iOS will notice that it also now shows you the entire image, whereas before it always seemed to obscure some of it which could be frustrating.

You can now also search photos in your library, but this seems limited to locations, dates, and album names.

A slightly less useful feature for some may be the ability to hide photos from Moments, Collections and Years but still be visible in Albums. I’m guessing this is to make your Moments less cluttered.

Camera

It’s now super easy to create a time-lapse with the built in Camera app. Although lacking any options, it’s simplicity is actually quite nice to use. Tap to start, tap when you’re done, iOS will stitch it together for you. Hopefully we’ll see some options for shots-per-minute etc in the future.

The standard Photo and Square modes of the camera now have a timer option, letting you choose between 3 seconds and 10 seconds. Apparently you’ll also be able to use an Watch to use as a remote shutter, too.

You now have greater control over exposure while taking a picture too, after tapping on your subject a yellow ☼ icon will appear; you can drag this up and down to further fine-tune exposure.

If you’re one of those super annoying people that take pictures of stuff on holiday with your iPad’s shitty camera (WHY?!) then you can also now take panoramas with it too. Just rest assured you’re being judged by everyone who can see you.

Calendar

iOS 8 makes adding recurring events to the calendar much more useful for custom periods. You can now choose to repeat it Daily, Weekly, Monthly or Yearly, and then choose how often. For example you can choose to have a bi-annual event repeat every two years, or even choose to have it repeat your local Farmers’ Market on the second Sunday of every month.

New calendar events can also use your location or search Maps for places, and also estimate travel time. You can even choose for it to mark you as busy for the estimated travel time; useful for shared calendars.

Mail

While composing an email you can now pull it downwards to get back to your inbox, useful if you need to check another email to know what to reply with. Swipe back up to continue composing it.

Mail will try and check your emails for important information, and if it thinks it finds some it will give you a quick way of adding that information to your calendar or address book at the top of the email.

You can quickly mark a message as unread by swiping right on it in your inbox, or swipe left to quickly flag, archive/delete or choose more options.

Family Sharing

Not something that I will be using just yet (unless my cat learns how to use iOS), Family Sharing is designed to be an easy way to share purchases with your family. Presumably this can be used for friends too, but the idea is that all devices use the same account for billing, and kids have to request approval from a parent to buy things, which just pops up on your device to approve or deny.

It’s also a way of sharing content among your household, be that music, films, photos and calendars. You can also find out where anyone in your family is.

You never have to share your Apple ID or passwords with each other, and you can use it to create IDs for kids under 13.

Continuity

If you have more than one iOS device or also have a Mac (running OS X Yosemite), continuity is a set of really cool features that help you seamlessly transition between devices.

Handoff means if you start writing an email on your phone, you can finish writing it on your Mac at exactly the point you were on your phone. Likewise if you’re viewing a website on a Mac at home, when you leave you’ll be able to finish viewing that page on iOS. It’ll even scroll you to the point in the page you were to make it even more seamless.

SMS and call relaying to other non-cellular iOS devices and Macs means that when you sign into the same iCloud account on your devices, when they’re all on the same WiFi network you’ll get a prompt asking you if you want to allow your other devices to use your iPhone to make and receive calls etc. This was all automatic for me, and I’ve been texting my mum from my non-cellular iPad, even though she doesn’t have iMessage.

Instant hotspot means that your iPad or Mac will automatically try and use your iPhone to connect to the internet when you’re out and about.

Extra Stuff

On the lock screen you’ll now get App Store app suggestions based on your location. If you’re near a Nando’s or Eurostar at St. Pancras, it’ll suggest the accompanying app for you to open or download.

Much like Siri’s new live feedback of your voice, dictation now types what you’re saying while you’re saying it; previously you had to wait until you’ve finished speaking for it to process your voice.

You can now see battery usage info app-by-app in Settings > Usage.

iOS will let you know if an app has been using your location in the background, and asks you if you want to continue to let it.

AirDrop now works from iOS to OS X Yosemite.

Touch ID has been given an API for developers to use, so you can expect apps like 1Password and PayPal to start using it. To reiterate, Touch ID never actually gives your fingerprint data to iOS or developers, it just encrypts it in a special enclave on your iPhone’s processor. When you touch your finger on the sensor, iOS asks Touch ID “is this a valid fingerprint”, and Touch ID replies with yes or no.

Developers can now make extensions for apps for the first time, which means that apps can make small useful extensions for their main app to be used in other apps. For example, Pinterest can make a “Pin” extension to use in a photography app. Apple have made this as secure as possible and extensions still cannot modify iOS or any other app directly.

You can now choose to ask iOS to send its location to iCloud/Find my iPhone when the battery is low, so if it’s lost and the battery dies you can still find it.

There’s a selection of awesome new wallpapers to choose from and Control Centre has been redesigned slightly.

You can now delete whole albums at a time from Music, just swipe like you would on a single.

When you bring up the share/action sheet (for example when adding a bookmark in Safari), you can now reorder the apps which appear, and also choose to hide them altogether. Hold down to reorder (like on the Home Screen) or tap More to choose which ones to hide.

Reachability is a feature reserved for the soon-to-be-released iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, which makes it possible to still use them with one hand. As they have bigger screens, it’s not possible for everyone to reach the top of the screen with one hand (especially the Plus), but by double tapping (not pressing) the Touch ID/Home button it will bring the whole screen down. Once you’ve tapped/gestured on what you needed to (like answering a notification), it returns to normal.

Lastly, HomeKit is another new API that Apple have created, designed to make it really easy for MFi (Made For iPhone) home equipment to integrate with iOS, so things like Nest and Philips Hue can take advantage of these APIs, and it even integrates Siri into being able to activate MFi gadgets. I’m personally hoping this means the Dyson 360 Eye will take advantage of these APIs!

Today I think I had a revelation. I spent a lot of my youth being fascinated with Space and everything about it. I’m still a big sci-fi fan now, but nowadays it’s purely for entertainment purposes rather than learning.

But a quote that was posted on Twitter today got me thinking again:

“Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy” – Albert Einstein

As a kid I used to accept that before the universe, there was nothing, and that the universe is expanding into more nothingness. But because of that I kept thinking “well, what does ‘nothing’ look like? Our universe isn’t infinite, nothing is infinite so it has to stop somewhere, what happens when we get to the edge of our universe?”.

What I didn’t realise until today is that I had answered my own question. Nothing is infinite. The nothingness that the universe is expanding into, is infinite. In my head I was bundling Space and the universe as one thing, which is false. Space is just a vacuum – the name we humans gave this vacuum – and is the same vacuum that the edge of our universe is expanding into. The vacuum that the universe is expanding into is infinite, because it’s nothing.

Imagining nothingness like that seems really hard, but it’s not. If we had an object and sucked all of the atmosphere out of it, what would be left inside? Nothing. Nothing apart from any objects which weren’t sucked out. Imagine those objects (which would be floating if it wasn’t for our planet’s gravity) are parts of our universe, and the vacuum around them is Space. The only real difference here is that we’ve had to use an object to create a vacuum, because of the atmosphere already on our planet.

The key point here is to stop thinking of Space and the universe as one thing, as though the universe ‘contains’ space. It doesn’t, Space ‘contains’ the universe. (Or more precisely, the universe exists in Space). Space would be there even if the universe didn’t exist.

The gay community is such a paradox. On the one hand, we thrive in a close community where most people know each other (or at least of each other). Then, on the other hand, we treat each other like shit.

It’s been troubling me a lot recently; particularly since there’s been a few celebrities coming out of the closet. Some of the horrendous attitudes I’ve been seeing on Twitter (another close community for gay people) towards the announcements is just abhorrent.

Tom Daley announces he’s dating a guy, suddenly people flock to follow him or do the complete opposite and slate him for the way he’s done it, for dating an older guy just for money, or any other number of judgemental opinions.

Ellen Page, on Valentine’s Day at a human rights conference, gave one of the most moving speeches I’ve ever heard which ended in her admitting to the world that she’s gay. She admitted that it was partly selfish, but she also recognised that in doing so she may help others who are struggling with their sexuality because of either life at home, the community they’re in, their religion, or for whatever reason they may be scared. Maybe even scared for their own safety, not just of being disowned by friends and family.

Again, people flocked to follow Ellen Page, and then we saw a wave of people saying how ridiculous it is just because she’s admitted she’s gay. Or worse, that it’s not a big deal that she’s come out.

Firstly, is it really that difficult to believe that some people are just following her as a sign of respect? I certainly sent her a tweet immediately to say how proud of her I am. Sure, I don’t know her, but you can tell it was hard for her and the pressure in the industry she’s in must be huge. Secondly, are people so narrow minded that they forget that there are people in the world that don’t have it as easy as some of us? Even in this country there is still a vile amount of bullying in schools, children still take their lives, people still live their lives pretending to be someone they’re not. If Ellen Page, drawing on the support of the Time to THRIVE human rights foundation, helps just one other person stop bullying a gay kid in school, stops one kid from killing themselves, or allows one person to live their life comfortably and without lying, is that really a bad thing?

“Polite reminder for straight people who say “who cares” when someone comes out: such gestures are addressed to lonely queer kids. not you.”

Minus calling them queer, I totally agree with that statement. What upset me is seeing a response, from a gay man, that said:

“Then why don’t they gather up all the lonely queer kids and address them directly.”

As though that’s even a viable option? It’s so closed-minded I can’t even bear it.

I do of course believe that someone saying they’re gay shouldn’t be a huge deal, but it’s a fact that at the moment it is, and until we can get to a place in the world where people can be themselves without fear, it will stay that way. So let’s work with what we’ve got, let’s set a good example to the next generation and support any movement that helps others. We don’t have to applaud the fact they’re gay, we just have to applaud the fact that it may help another human being.